…well, I’ll say it again, it doesn’t mean that.
But don’t tell that to President Obama, who thinks “stimulus” literally means spending taxpayer cash, and can only mean that. In fact any notion to the contrary is used by Obama as a laugh line, as shown here, from February 2009, in what I think will go down in history as one of the most important examples of the kind of arrogance and blithe, insular, urbane, and specious neoliberal-left “progressive” ideology (and the accompanying group-think —just listen to the audience) that led to the collapse of the world economy:
As a sensible guy who has learned from history, my kind of government “stimulus” doesn’t involve any government borrowing, and spending, and corporate welfare, or full-on bailouts. Nor any Soviet-style central planning of the economy in order to “fix it” for the people who, it is presumed, can’t fix it on their own through the proven science of the free market and its built-in repair forces. Nor does “stimulus” mean increasing the taxation of “the rich” and of businesses and reducing the tax 
base to supposedly facilitate more spending of even more massive sums of taxpayers’ money on dubious projects deigned appropriate by liberal-left-minded bureaucrats and politicians, which are really nothing more than political or ideological or socialist-style wealth-redistribution projects. Nor does it involved printing money to make it all work (or I should say seem to work). And it involves no social engineering projects disguised as “health care” or “green jobs” or government projects which are really just more new, specious entitlement programs designed purely to grow even more reliance on government by individuals and businesses, and to further redistribute wealth. And it certainly doesn’t include the government taking an ownership position in the means of production, since as those who are proponents of that must know, that is the very essence of 
communism. Which is why I include a gratuitous picture of Karl Marx, at left, and one of me, at right.
In fact it means none of those things, all of which I have to think may or may not actually be nefariously designed to handicap our nations’ futures as free, capitalist nations.
“Stimulus”, to me, means stopping the government borrowing and printing of money, which is now gravely handicapping our future as free nations. It also means cutting taxes, getting government out of the way of people and business, stopping government’s incessant meddling in the free market and in every day life, unleashing the genius of private enterprise and the citizens working on their own and making their own decisions with their own money. And it means reducing the size and scope of government as a general matter.
Which is why I include this additional example of clarity of thought. This is from the Wall Street Journal, today, by Michael Boskin, who is a professor of economics at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
An Alternative Stimulus Plan
A payroll tax cut would add three to four million jobs at a fraction of the cost of the stimulus bill.…Since the stimulus bill was signed, the ranks of the unemployed have grown by over three million (over four million if involuntary part-time and discouraged workers are included). The unemployment rate, which the Obama administration projected the stimulus would contain at 8%, is now 10.2%.
[…]
My Stanford colleague Pete Klenow and Rochester economist Mark Bils estimated that cutting the payroll tax by six percentage points (of the 12.4% Social Security component) would, under standard assumptions, increase employment by three million to four million workers—an amount equal to all the job losses since the stimulus was passed.
[…]
Yet the president and Congress are preparing vast new taxes on employment in the health-care reform and other legislation. Raising the federal top tax rate to 45% (from the current 35% with a 5.4% surcharge plus the expiration of the Bush tax cuts) will hit successful small businesses especially hard. The tax hike on capital gains and dividends hidden in the fine print of the health-care legislation will also raise the cost of equity capital, further weakening businesses (including banks) desperate for private capital. Many firms will also face either an 8% additional payroll tax or be forced to pay a higher share of health insurance premiums. Such tax increases will hit employment and wages hard.
[…]
By far the best response to these headwinds is to curtail the huge current and contemplated future government control of the economy with a clear, predictable exit strategy—before the programs become permanently entrenched, develop powerful dependent constituencies, and greatly increase the risk of rising interest rates, inflation and taxation. Doing so would more rapidly improve the outlook for permanent private-sector employment, investment and growth than any conceivable second stimulus. It would also allocate capital and labor to their highest value in providing goods and services that people actually want and need, not what government bureaucrats want them to have. …
Which is why we must stop the governments from doing what they are bent on doing right now, and stop and think next time we vote, and not do what I jokingly or sarcastically tell you to do at the end of so many blog entries (“Vote liberal”). It means voting for actual conservatives. Not RINOs, not pretend conservatives. That’s stimulus.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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